I’ve seen a lot of requests for specifying Today() as a prefill option for a date field, but I haven’t been able to find any asking whether you can pass Airtable a specific date as a prefill option. Is this a thing?
Solved
Prefill a Specific Date in a Form
+13Best answer by ScottWorld
You can use the ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT function to encode the date into your URL.
The string format (before you URL encode it) should be as simple as this:
1/28/2021 8:00am
Also, Kuovonne has created the Prefilled Forms extension to help with prefilled URLs for forms.
2025 Update:
For other people reading this post in the future, an even better way of doing prefills would be to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
If you need a constantly-changing prefill date which is based on the date that the user fills out the form, check out the screenshot below for how easy this is to setup in Fillout.
Even if you don’t need a constantly-changing date, it’s much easier to prefill forms with Fillout, because they give a variety of different ways of prefilling — including the incredible ability to dynamically pre-fetch a record from Airtable using a simple URL, which can then be used to prefill fields on your form. (No more complicated URLs to prefill an entire form.)
Even better, Fillout is 100% free and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update existing Airtable records with a form, create PDF files from a form submission, create new linked records with a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, and much more.
I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
- Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
Hope this helps!
If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
+29Yes, you can prefill a form with a specific date. You may need to play around with the url encoding of the date string you use.
+35I think he means that he wants the form to continually pre-fill with a different date, depending on today’s date.
The only way to do this would be to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
See screenshot below for how easy this is to setup with Fillout.
Fillout is 100% free, and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update Airtable records using a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, create new linked records on a form, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, connect a single form to dozens of external apps simultaneously, add CAPTCHAs to your form, and much more.
I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
- Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
Even if you don’t need a constantly-changing date, it’s much easier to prefill forms with Fillout, because they give a variety of different ways of prefilling — including the incredible ability to dynamically pre-fetch a record from Airtable using a simple URL, which can then be used to prefill fields on your form. (No more complicated URLs to prefill an entire form.)
Hope this helps!
If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
+29I think he means that he wants the form to continually pre-fill with a different date, depending on today’s date. The only way to do that would be to keep changing the URL, yes?
To prefill a form with a different date would require a different url with different url parameters.
However, I’m not sure what you mean by “continually prefill”.
Perhaps @Julian_E_Post can give more details with some specific examples?
+35To prefill a form with a different date would require a different url with different url parameters.
However, I’m not sure what you mean by “continually prefill”.
Perhaps @Julian_E_Post can give more details with some specific examples?
“Continually prefill”: meaning that the value changes every time someone goes to the form.
@Julian_E_Post: If this is what you are looking to do, you would need to use Fillout for that. (See my post above.)
- ScottWorld, Expert Airtable Consultant
+13Thanks @ScottWorld and @kuovonne . For this post, I am interested in how to input a static date. The URL will change based on a formula in Airtable. What is the string format that Airtable will accept to prefill a date and time. For example, Jan 28, 2021 at 8:00am?
+35You can use the ENCODE_URL_COMPONENT function to encode the date into your URL.
The string format (before you URL encode it) should be as simple as this:
1/28/2021 8:00am
Also, Kuovonne has created the Prefilled Forms extension to help with prefilled URLs for forms.
2025 Update:
For other people reading this post in the future, an even better way of doing prefills would be to use Fillout’s advanced forms for Airtable.
If you need a constantly-changing prefill date which is based on the date that the user fills out the form, check out the screenshot below for how easy this is to setup in Fillout.
Even if you don’t need a constantly-changing date, it’s much easier to prefill forms with Fillout, because they give a variety of different ways of prefilling — including the incredible ability to dynamically pre-fetch a record from Airtable using a simple URL, which can then be used to prefill fields on your form. (No more complicated URLs to prefill an entire form.)
Even better, Fillout is 100% free and it offers hundreds of features that Airtable’s native forms don’t offer, including the ability to update existing Airtable records with a form, create PDF files from a form submission, create new linked records with a form, display Airtable lookup fields on forms, control access to a form via SSO or email domains, perform math or other live calculations on your forms, accept payments on forms, collect signatures on a form, create multi-page forms with conditional paths, and much more.
I show how to use a few of the advanced features of Fillout on these 2 Airtable podcast episodes:
- Using Fillout to create an eSignature approval process with PDF file creation.
- Using Fillout to create an order entry form with line items.
Hope this helps!
If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld
+13Very cool! I am completely new to URL encoding, but I can reverse-engineer @kuovonne 's app-generated urls to figure it out. Thanks!
+10the key to prefilling dates is DO NOT encode the date:
this won't work- prefill_Date%3D2024-08-26T17%3A00%3A32.802Z
this will work- prefill_Date=2024-08-26T17:00:32.802Z
+1FWIW here is the formula string that returned the desired results for me:
For some reason allowing it to encode the time component didn’t work, and neither did leaving it out. Seems like it has to have a static time entered specifically like this to satisfy the form’s input parameters.
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